Alfred Hitchcock never got a gold statuette for directing — and the same fate could be playing out for our modern Hitch, who is earning rave reviews for his newest thriller, "Gone Girl," opening on Friday.

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Fincher's taut marital mystery — which joins a body of equally edgy, coolly confident work such as "Se7en" (1995), "Fight Club" (1999), "The Social Network" (2010) and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (2012) — has already ensured his place among today's most acclaimed filmmakers.

But that and $2.50 gets you a MetroCard, not a statue for your mantel. Hitchcock was nominated five times for best director with no wins. Fincher has two noms (so far), but Oscar's treatment of him is for the birds.

"You hear Academy voters saying, 'Well, I liked and respected the 'The Social Network,' but it's a cold movie,' " says Anthony Breznican, who covers awards season for Entertainment Weekly, of Fincher's last nomination.

"Martin Scorsese, Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick … they're easy to respect and admire, but they are hard to love. And the Oscar is about warmth and feeling good and being uplifting."

Ben Affleck, left, is the husband at the center of the mystery in David Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl.’ From left are Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Barnes and Kim Dickens. (Merrick Morton)

Ben Affleck, an Oscar winner and increasingly lauded director himself, says he signed up to star in "Gone Girl" as a man who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife in large part to learn from Fincher.

"Before all the movies I directed, all three of them, I watched 'Se7en,' " Affleck said at a press conference after the "Gone Girl" premiere at the New York Film Festival last week. "It's the most perfect, meticulous, Swiss watch-made thing. What kind of person makes a movie like that?"

The kind of person who carefully hand-picks his cast and crew and meticulously fusses over the details of all of his camera angles, lighting and music — and taking a copious amount of takes just to be sure.

Fincher cut his teeth on the most populist of mediums, commercials (Pepsi, Nike, Budweiser, AT&T) and music videos (Madonna, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson) and it shows in his storytelling.

"You can get a lot of data across to an attentive audience over a short period of time," Fincher explained to reporters last week of his philosophy.

Attentive audiences have come to appreciate the mind who stuffed Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box in "Se7en," bloodied up Brad Pitt in "Fight Club," emotionally scarred Jake Gyllenhaal in "Zodiac," and chilled audiences with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

Even "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) and "The Social Network," the dramas that earned him his only two Academy Award nominations, were emotionally murky and dark.

Rosamund Pike, hand-picked by Fincher to play the enigmatic beauty at the heart of "Gone Girl," has warm and fuzzy feelings for her director, despite his penchant for shooting far more takes than most of his contemporaries.

"I look at the film I did before 'Gone Girl,' and I think, 'God, that looks so immature compared to the eight months I did with David Fincher,' " Pike told The News, too polite and British to reveal whether she was panning her performance in "What We Did on Our Holiday" or "Hector and the Search for Happiness."

Like all truly great directors, Fincher not only has a way of finding the right actor for the right part, but also getting the perfect performance out of her. Many critics scratched their heads when Fincher snubbed better-known actresses in favor of Pike for "Gone Girl" and Rooney Mara for "Dragon Tattoo" — that is, until they saw the final products.

"You have to kind of imagine the dynamic that you want. It's like you're putting together a team," Fincher said. "You have room for a point guard, you want a power forward, you figure out how they're going to work together."

He doesn't always draft up scoring game plans.

His 1992 movie debut, "Alien3," was a horror story behind the scenes, with studio interference more intrusive than face-hugging extraterrestrials. Then there was the highly anticipated "Dragon Tattoo," which kicked up a hornet nest of industry chatter when it bombed at the box office.

But there are more wins than losses on Fincher's résumé, including a successful moonlighting gig on the small screen with Netflix' "House of Cards" and the just-announced HBO series, "Utopia," which will reteam him with "Gone Girl" author Gillian Flynn.

The rave reviews for “Gone Girl” — including five stars in the Daily News — may power Fincher’s drive for his first golden statuette. That would be a twist ending that thrill expert Alfred Hitchcock never pulled off, unless you count the Academy's consolation prize, the Irving G. Thalberg Award.

Brad Pitt (center) in David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’ (Merrick Morton)

But some Oscar buzz for Fincher has nothing to do with "Gone Girl."

"Maybe it's just his time to win an Academy Award," says Ira Deutchman, chair of Columbia University's film program. "Sometimes a body of work builds up where people start paying attention. Arguably, when Martin Scorsese won his Oscar (for "The Departed") it was not necessarily for his best film.

"People start to recognize the craft underneath."

With Kate Erbland

Fincher short takes

David Fincher's work puts you through the wringer, his images playing in your head long after they dance across your eyeballs. The music videos that made his name — including Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" (1989) and Madonna's "Vogue" (1990) — are visually rich, as every one of his features have been. Here are three movie moments that have left indelible marks:

"Se7en" (1995)

In a movie set primarily in a grungy urban noir world, the ending — in which Morgan Freeman discovers Gwyneth Paltrow's (unseen) head in a box, as Brad Pitt confronts Kevin Spacey — is a nightmare lit in broad daylight.

"Fight Club" (1999)

Edward Norton's been talking to himself, and to us the audience, about his new cool pal Tyler Durden (Pitt). They beat each other senseless in a series of scenes that convince us they're pal-combatants. Little do we know, well, you know the first rule of Fight Club ...

"Zodiac" (2007)

San Francisco Chronicle employees Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal become progressively more obsessed with the hunt for the titular serial killer in the Bay Area — resulting in Gyllenhaal's nervous confrontation with a man in a hardware store he's convinced is the as-yet-unknown fiend. Joe Neumaier